Free
by scuttlesworth
Summary: Brian's first look at his brother. Rated T for the fact that it's Brian, even without violence. Comments very welcome.


He's here.

I get my first glimpse of him as he walk out of his apartment. His hair is darker. He's tall and lean and I watch with amazement as he leaves his front door and walks, loose-limbed, down to his car and drives away. He moves with such confidence. Arrogance.

He'c so changed. I feel as thought I'm looking at a ghost. I want to touch him, feel his solidity under my fingers. Reassure myself that he won't disappear.

Soon.

I follow him to work.

What. The. Fuck.

He's a cop?

I feel despair and anger. I came here, all this way, did all that work for this reward? I bare my teeth.

I pictured this, of course. In my darkest moments I pictured him as a fat and stupid cop, eating donuts and cracking feeble jokes about what he could never understand, except for a little flicker of light like an old movie in the dim recesses of his mind. Slow and weighted, covered by encrusted layers of stinking humanity, the monster within half-dead from the pressure of all that relentless pedestrian bullshit. But I never dreamed my nightmares could be real. I want to walk in and kill them all right now.

I want to leave, but I don't. Something is nagging at me.

He walks differently as he walks into the police station. Shoulders a little hunched, as though he's entering the enemy's den. No uniform. Wake up and think, you idiot. Fears aside, no brother of mine would ever be a beat cop. Even with the influence of that thief who took him and left me. And look, he doesn't walk like a cop. So no, despite the building he can't be precisely a cop. But he works for them. With them. In a building foul of them.

The sense of betrayal is less, but still overwhelming. How could any blood relation of mine work in this sparkling building full of conformity? I should have done more research before I came to look at him. I should know why he's here in this building. What sort of bleating herd animal my beautiful little brother has turned into.

I spend the day outside in the maintenance van, fingers drumming on the wheel, foot twitching. When the patrol officer comes over to check with me I snap at him in annoyance. It makes me more convincing. He leaves with a sarcastic warning.

I follow Dexter home.

He doesn't leave that night.

Brother. Did they fit you to their straightjacket so very closely?

I go back to my own home.

Soon.

I'm obsessed. I follow him to work the next day. Again, outside the police department. Risky. But I can't stay away. Maintenance twice in tow days? But he leaves again, almost as soon as he gets there. I follow. He's easy. We end up at a crime scene. My disguise works just as well here as it did in front of the police station. I track his tawny head as he moves behind the tape. He breaks out a camera, begins to study the body. There's a lot of blood.

It begins to make a little more sense. He's not theirs, not completely. He's using them to get what he wants, and what he wants is blood. I can see it in how he looks, in how he moves, in his complete focus on the body. The light in his eyes that he hides when he turns to look at the living around him. The dead body is whispering to him. The sticky red on the pavement, the way he orbits it like a comet - further out, then pulled back in. The way his hands move when he collects samples.

Brother. It's the blood you love.

Maybe he's not so very hopeless after all.

I follow him back to the station.

After work he goes home again and I sit in the new car and watch his door. I'm frowning. I feel no desire to leave, though. I'm content to sit there all day watching his door, knowing he's there behind it, wondering what he would do if I knocked. Then he comes out.

He looks… different.

I feel my blood sing.

He gets in his car and drives smoothly, cleanly through the Miami traffic. I'm very, very careful now. Something, something…. we move from the clean neighborhood he lives in to a commercial district to a shithole block of tattoo parlors, bars and cafes. Brother, what are you doing here? Curiouser and curiouser, deeper and deeper. Night falls and we're in a very bad part of town and he slows in a dark alley. Stops in the shadows. Stays in the car and watches something I can't see from here. We're hunting.

My brother and I are hunting.

I want to dance. I stare at him unblinking for nearly two hours as he waits. He's patient, like me. Eventually he starts his car and begins to follow something. I follow him. We end up in another shithole neighborhood, this one residential, and I catch a glimpse of the stumbling wreck he's been trailing. He speeds up and heads home, and I break it off. No use pushing my luck this early.

My brother is stalking something. He's not a cop, he's a forensics lab rat. So brother, why are you hunting the most dangerous prey of all? Oh, don't answer. I know why, really, at my core. But… the question is. What are you willing to do with this hunt?

Brother, how far does this hunt go for you?

I need to know more. I have to get closer. There has to be something here.

I slip into his apartment with the greatest of ease. The door opens and I'm standing there in the same rooms he lives in, sleeps in, eats in. My first look at the inside of his life.

He's tidy. It looks very plain. Books, pictures. Pictures draw me like blood draws sharks. There he is. Young. An intermediate stage between my little brother and the grown man I've seen. I touch the glass with my finger, gently rub it over his face. Smudge the print I've left. And there beside him the thief. There, in another picture, the thief's daughter, clinging to his arm like some sort of limpet. The smile on his face is almost perfect.

Almost is the operative word.

I get to work.

Fifteen years in a mental institution. You never have any privacy, any dignity, anything external. He isn't me, though, in this respect. He doesn't keep everything inside himself. He has externals, like every normal thing, and fifteen years of relentless searches and clever nurses has given me all the training I need. I can find anything in any room; no hiding place is safe. I find the slides first.

He's a blood spatter analyst; you could possibly expect him to have slides of blood at home. So why hide them? Doesn't want people knowing he takes his work home with him? No, no, no. I'm smiling, touching them. I pull them out, hold them up to the light. Stare at the color they make. Oh, brother, yes. I know these for what they are. I know I know I know. And so may! So many, far more than I've managed. He's a profligate brother, oh yes he has!

Now that I know I'm looking for something special the trunk and it's flee bottom aren't hard to find, although the trick catch is clever and I spend half an hour trying to figure out how to get in. But oh, when I do, it's like Christmas. I don't touch. It's rude to touch.

Oh, brother. Little brother. How do I come to you? Do I sit here? Do I wait for you today, in this apartment, and let you see me when you come home? Will you embrace me, and we'll go out and send rivers of blood flowing through the streets? Liberate oceans of it, drown the oceans in screams, turn the moon red… I stare around at the bed and the clothing and the books and my joy trembles. Something's wrong. Something here will not support my delight. What is spoiling my glee? What is it that's o terrible that… oh.

Books. Pictures. Bed. Clothing. Refrigerator. Oven. Fucking girlfriend and job and car.

My brother is living a lie. He's worked hard to build it up. He's devoted himself to this mask, this facade that walls him in. He' s in a cage… and he's complicit in maintaining it.

Oh, brother. How could I know? In the institution they taught me all about the walls people build around their lives. How could I know? I thought you were the free one, the one who got to live out here, but I was wrong, wasn't I? I was. You're not free. You're trapped.

I slowly put it all back the way I saw it and leave. If I stay he might smell my joy, lingering on the air like perfume.

Don't worry, brother. I'm here now.

I'll save you. No matter what it takes, I'll set you free.


End file.
